Some goods and more bondo work Now that I have my car in use again, I went to some more distant hardware stores. Here is what I found: The upmost one is black tubing meant for electric installations. They now had black version of the tubing I have had for long. It’s a bit dim, but I guess some polishing will brighten it up. A lot easier than having to paint light hose and even if I paint it it’s better to have dim black show if paint peels of than murky white.. The rest is mostly cabling of different types: Pinkish red version of the speaker cable I had as orangish red this far - nice, I plan to mix them and use another one to mean 5V and another 12V.. These ones are really nice, they are very deep and bright even under normal light. The fluorescent glow just is not capturable with my camera.. Then 1.5mm² thick blue cable and black cables of sizes 1.5mm², 2*0.75mm² and finally 3*1mm². I now have some 65 meters of electric cable in total - should be enough to wire a single case, especially since many of there are multi-threaded. The bottommost item is spring for bending 20mm electric tubing. You can guess what a modder will do with that one.. On top of it is assortment of rubber grommets and finally two pieces of ball bearings. The last item is maybe not so obvious, but you will later see what I will use it for.. On the upper shroud front I bought some new types of filling/gluing/sealing materials. This one is meant to fill small gaps in window frames and furniture before painting them: And then a lot of it applied to fill the gaps in the mold: Discuss this post in the discussion thread.
I've been watching this for awhile your work is simply amazing. I cannot wait to see this case take shape. Keep up the awesome job!
It looks pretty kool but I dont really understand what you're making with that bondo etc ..could you explain it to me ?
Thanks a lot! Ok, here comes. This is what I want to achieve: So, the three fans are fastened to the acrylic shroud, which in turn sits on the top part of the radiator. Shroud is there to make sure the airflow from fans blows through the radiator and not back to motherboard side, thus cooling both radiator fins and the MB compartment. And here is where the mold enters the picture: So the point of the mold is to be rigidly on the shape I want the acrylic to be. Since acrylic is *very* hard to stretch, the base will have to be solid and stand lots of heat without giving in. Does this make sense?
Status 23.12.2005 This is status from last night; I had to wait until tomorrow midday to get some images, since my digital camera refused to work - and it's pretty hard to get repair or replacement one for few days right now . The images are crappy, even thou I waited for the lightest time of the day, since I had to take them with my phone camera. It does not have fastening for tripod, nor flash, and we have only some 4 hours of daylight per day, so do not expect any good quality images for few days . As you can see, the shape is now mostly there: Filling the last cracks and bumps is underway, but this starts to be good enough for the purpose. BTW, the snow-covered rooftops and tree on the background also serves as my x-mas greetings to you all . And now back to eating and drinking some more.. Discuss this post in the discussion thread.
I'm fairly sure that all polyester resins (primary component in bondo) stink like that. DEFINITELY an outside job.
Yeah.. Unfortunately this is not an option for some four months yet . In our current apartment we do not have own balcony, and even if we had, it's mostly too dark and wet to work outside and too cold for bondo to dry.. Oh well, gotta use non-elastic stuff, since this is just a mold, it does not have to stand wear and tear.
Small update As I mentioned, my old digicam went broke and I had to get a new one. While I was at it, I went for a lot better one: Canon Powershot 620. The size is about the same, but two years of development and 100 euros more price ensured that inside it’s a lot better: It’s a wonderful device. It can be either full automatic, full manual or almost anything in between. 7 megapixels, 4x optical zoom, very good image quality, 1.3 sec boot power-on time _with_ extending the lens, fast enough processor to continuously shoot as much as you will without having to wait for the camera to save. And it supports tons of pre-set modes, one of which is panorama mode - very nice! On actual modding front, here is my latest acquisitions: On the left is 120mm Nexus fan; I bought it mostly to have common reference point with other silencing enthusiasts. On the right is Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160G SATA - the first 160G hard drive with just _single_ platter. I plan to have two of them in RAID-0 configuration once I’m done with this. Right now it will just replace my 160G 7200.7 PATA since SATA cables are a lot easier to fit to this mod. The reason why I bought it now is that one of the discs in our home server has failed and I plan to swap that PATA drive there. Additional 120G of disk space does not hurt either, since the drive it’s replacing was just an old 40G IBM workhorse.
Some new goods Just a small update. I'm still busy as hell at work, and right now I need to do some more planning to continue concrete modding work. I tested stretching 1mm PVC film over my upper shroud mold and found it to be *very* hard job. So I am considering doing the final acrylic one from several pieces, and in order to know where I want the seams to be, I need to decide how the surrounding parts will be fitted. Anyway, my order from Delvie's Plastics finally arrived. Since the goods weight several kilos, I asked for them to ship it with the cheapest airmail method and yes, it really was slow. I guess the x-mas time has slowed postal service down even from the regular level. But here they are: Acrylic hinge parts, rods and sheets. Nice. The smaller sheets from closer distance. Pretty dull, huh: ..until you give 'em some UV light: Delvie's offers nice assortments of all their four fluorescent acrylic sheets, and one of them I got. I also got the Seagate Barracuda 160G 7200.9 I ordered a while ago. Here are the Seagate siblings: the old 160G 7200.7 PATA and the new 160G 7200.9 SATA: As you might remember, I will swap the PATA drive in to our home server to replace a failed RAID part there. The SATA one will become my new system drive as soon as I get the operating systems moved from PATA drive there. And for the record, here is the HDD cooling/silencing system from my current rig: Drive sits inside the cage and then both stand on the rubber feet at the bottom of the case. Unfortunately, as SPCR found out, the 7200.9 has sharper seek noise than the 7200.7 one, even thou is has fewer platters. Oh well.. It's still very quiet, so I should have no problems damping it. You can discuss this post in the discussion thread.
That is some pretty colorful acrylic ya got there!! Should be interesting to see how it all looks together Are you glad you got acrylic, or would you have liked to have used polycarbonate? Wich is your personal favorite to work with?
TEC Idea Inspired by the CoolIT integrated TEC CPU cooling solution I started to wonder about using double water loops to take advantage of TECs when needed. The main reason why I had decided not to use TECs was that if you install them on your CPU and GPU you need to give them power all the time to prevent them from working as a insulation. Then I came up with this idea: As you can see, the idea is to have TECs between two water loops and then have a valve to control whether water gets to "direct" contact with another loop or not. To balance the restriction for the two pumps I chose to put the components that can run hotter or can do without so much cooling to the second loop. So, when not needing the absolutely highest clocks, I could run without TECs and have quite low power consumption (like 200W for the whole system under load) and then when wanting to get all the speed I can get I could turn the valve, power the TECs and let them drain another 200-300W. This of course puts requirements for the radiator quite high, but I have plenty of headroom there. Do you think this makes sense? You can discuss this post in the discussion thread.
TEC Idea Thanks guys! I have to say that I have no experience whatsoever with polycarbonate. I chose acrylic since there was more information available about it on the modding sites and it was easier to get in strange shapes and colors. I had an idea in my head and I was pretty certain it could be implemented in acrylic so I went with it. And a small update: TEC Idea
I love machining polycarbonate, I just don't like gluing it (the glue is very stinky). Thanks for mentioning the cinemediapc ZDS, you got a lotta good acrylic work in this project. For the record. I learned the technique of back painting acrylic from macroman on his macroblack project.
